I don’t have time to comment at length on this Scott Horton article–revealing many details surrounding the deaths of three Gitmo detainees claimed to have killed themselves. But go read the whole thing.

Here’s an excerpt–which suggests that when the three detainees died, they were not in Camp Delta, but outside of their cells.

At approximately 11:45 p.m.—nearly an hour before the NCIS claims the first body was discovered—Army Specialist Christopher Penvose, preparing for a midnight shift in Tower 1, was approached by a senior Navy NCO. Penvose told me that the NCO—who, following standard operating procedures, wore no name tag—appeared to be extremely agitated. He instructed Penvose to go immediately to the Camp Delta chow hall, identify a female senior petty officer who would be dining there, and relay to her a specific code word. Penvose did as he was instructed. The officer leapt up from her seat and immediately ran out of the chow hall.

Another thirty minutes passed. Then, as Hickman and Penvose both recall, Camp Delta suddenly “lit up”—stadium-style flood lights were turned on, and the camp became the scene of frenzied activity, filling with personnel in and out of uniform. Hickman headed to the clinic, which appeared to be the center of activity, to learn the reason for the commotion. He asked a distraught medical corpsman what had happened. She said three dead prisoners had been delivered to the clinic. Hickman recalled her saying that they had died because they had rags stuffed down their throats, and that one of them was severely bruised. Davila told me he spoke to Navy guards who said the men had died as the result of having rags stuffed down their throats.

Hickman was concerned that such a serious incident could have occurred in Camp 1 on his watch. He asked his tower guards what they had seen. Penvose, from his position at Tower 1, had an unobstructed view of the walkway between Camp 1 and the medical clinic—the path by which any prisoners who died at Camp 1 would be delivered to the clinic. Penvose told Hickman, and later confirmed to me, that he saw no prisoners being moved from Camp 1 to the clinic. In Tower 4 (it should be noted that Army and Navy guard-tower designations differ), another Army specialist, David Caroll, was forty-five yards from Alpha Block, the cell block within Camp 1 that had housed the three dead men. He also had an unobstructed view of the alleyway that connected the cell block itself to the clinic. He likewise reported to Hickman, and confirmed to me, that he had seen no prisoners transferred to the clinic that night, dead or alive.

Don’t worry. With all the records the government keeps we should be able to tell exactly what happened, exactly who was responsable, wrap it up in a neat package and hand it to a prosecutor for trial and conviction.

Boxturtle (IF we had one federal prosecutor who wasn’t a political tool)

I believe we commented here on earlier news about this claimed suicide, though long after these deaths occurred. The mise en scene of these deaths would be hard even for a disgruntled postal worker to mimic – the mechanics would be impossible to self-inflict.

The immediate characterization of these deaths as a kind of asymmetrical warfare – a phrase Gandhi’s persecutors would have used had they been crude enough to invent it – is a strong indicator of guilty knowledge that something besides suicide occurred.

Wardens are always responsible for the prisoners in their charge – whether the issue is prisoner rape or suicide. And Gitmo is not a “theater of war” any more than were the locations from which many of these prisoners were taken. It is a controlled, permanent prison, fully staffed with the best of the best of the best, and wholly within territory controlled to the centimeter by the United States government. Something awful happened here, and the odds that it was suicide are poor.

And another thought after I hit send: At this point, is the DOJ able to avoid an investigation after this story?

The story has built a soild case for a coverup at least. Though we don’t know for sure what happened to the prisoners, the available data suggests criminal conduct. Even if the “accident” happened during appproved “enhanced” interrogation techniques, it’s at least neglegence. Cops have been jailed for not obtaining medical attention for a prisoner under interrogation, even if whatever condition is not due to the interrogation. And they’ve been successfully sued when the conduct does not meet criminal standards.

Of course, those cops were stupid. They should have taken their prisoner over the border, where their conduct is not subject to US jurisdiction.

But DOJ is going to have to at least come up with a story as to why they aren’t prosecuting.

I wish the DOJ would simply say “We’re not gonna do it. Waddya gonna do, impeach Obama over the rights of a bunch of crazy brown skinned arab moslem terrorists?”

These are more details than earlier discussed. So many thanks to Seton Hall and to Scott Horton.

Rigor mortis was setting in. In a hot climate like Cuba, that means that death occurred at least 2-4 hours before discovery, at about 12.30 am. Which means that these three prisoners used the same methods to “kill themselves” at the same time, early in an evening – and that at Gitmo’s highest security section, they remained undiscovered for four hours, a period that may well have included a change of shift.

One body was taken to a base clinic. No staff were there – no telephone number was posted (at a Marine Corps base staffed by Navy personnel?) – so the guards dialed 911. That’s a process that should have had the prison commander get a formal write up or persuade him to take early retirement. Didn’t happen here.

When I first heard this story, I assumed that the prisoners were killed by interrogators. The details in Horton’s story are more consistent with the prisoners being killed by other prisoners. In many ways, that would present a much greater threat to GITMO. Asymmetric warfare indeed.

I have a hard time believing that there was no emergency phone number posted in a hospital. That’s negligence, right there.
There should have been a doctor present, or at least a corpsman, because accidents and emergencies don’t run on a schedule.

I sure didn’t come to that conclusion and I’m not seeing how you got there.

You’re saying that a prisoner got out of his cell, managed to get into three other cells, restrain and kill the occupants, hang the sheets inside the cells, relock the doors of the cells and get back into his own cell and lock the door within a twenty minute bed check?

As I read the details, they are consistent with these prisoners being transferred to Camp No, interrogated – or punished – and killed there, then being transferred to the medical clinic back inside the camp and unloaded directly from the back of the “paddy wagon” – the one vehicled camp guards were ordered not to search. Guards on duty observed no prisoners, dead or alive, being transferred to the clinic from their cells during the relevant time period.

DOJ has “come up” with that story – it’s that Hickman can’t be “corroborated.” At least, not according to the person Obama’s DOJ appointed to conduct the investigation. Someone pretty experienced with torture murder after all, since it was someone who had “participated” in the drafting of at least one of the torture memos.

Thank God we elected Obama. /s

@5 – also a whole lot of thanks to Hickman and the other sources who have told the truth. Those guys were, and even to an extent still are, in a hell of a position. The only real pockets of integrity and bravery are soldiers who have everything stacked against them when they try to do the right thing – guys who really are putting everything on the line. There are a few scattered instances elsewhere, now and then a Tamm in DOJ or a Feingold in the Senate. But mostly the bravery hasn’t come from any of our so-called “leaders.” That is an incredibly telling point.

BTW – some of you psych guys will have to ante up with what the heck was going on with the guy who made soldiers line up to the strains of Bad Boys Bad Boys

Isn’t it kind of bizarre, reading that the military clinic that had no doctors available, and no doctors’ numbers or way of reaching them, would have a 911 line it could call?

@6 – what details in Horton’s story would indicate to you that they were killed by other detainees? It seems very circumstantially likely, from the details provided about 3 detainees being picked up in the white van and taken to Camp No and then one trip back from Camp No where the van backs up to the clinic – all coupled with no transfers from the cell block to the clinic during the operative time, that all the details in HOrton’s piece point to transport to torture (possibly JSOC instead of CIA, or both) followed by bodies dumped back at the clinic for cover up.

If we had elected McBush, we would not have had a decent health care bill, not have had war crimes prosecutions, we’d have got our butts kicked out of Iraq, and would have generally poor international relations because of our refusal to clean our own house.

My impression is that all of the details you describe were just made up after the fact. The three prisoners were killed by rags being stuffed down their throats. If interrogators killed three prisoners that way on the same day, there is something important we don’t know. If U.S. personnel are responsible, I’d say it would be more likely that guards were involved (they might want prisoners to be quiet).

But think about the message being sent by the manner of death (Don’t talk). If there was a conspiracy within the camp that was able to kill three prisoners at the same time without the guards finding out for hours, the military would have absolutely panicked. Suppose those three prisoners were assumed by other prisoners to be collaborators. At least one of them was scheduled to go home.

Now, think about the reaction of the Obama DOJ. If the three prisoners were killed by other prisoners, the cost of opening an investigation would completely outweigh any possible benefit from punishing the people who were derelict enough to allow this to happen.

The description of the DoJ and FBI’s behavior suggests that if there were an earlier, Bush administration cover-up, Eric Holder – who runs the DoJ and the FBI – has independently chosen to participate in it. If the underlying behavior is a crime, then covering it up is, too, even if you’re eating leftovers instead of first dibs.

The final comment Mr. Horton leaves to the father of one of these three dead, a brigadier in the Saudi police force:

Not everyone who is involved in this matter views it from a political perspective, of course. General Al-Zahrani grieves for his son, but at the end of a lengthy interview he paused and his thoughts turned elsewhere. “The truth is what matters,” he said. “They practiced every form of torture on my son and on many others as well. What was the result? What facts did they find? They found nothing. They learned nothing. They accomplished nothing.”

Bumgarner was known as an eccentric commander. Hickman marveled, for instance, at the colonel’s insistence that his staff line up and salute him, to music selections that included Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony and the reggae hit “Bad Boys,” as he entered the command center.

I recall reading a long time ago some kind of a farce – maybe it was written by Ludlum? – with a crazy general. This scene would have fit right in.

The info on the needle marks on his son’s body (with his observations that he’s in law enforcement himself, he knows what to look for on a body, and the outside autopsies) opens an additional can of worms as well. I wonder what, if any, testing was done for evidence of drugs and drugging.

I’m just having a real problem with the lapses in security that would require.

First, let’s assume that the prisoners moved to camp No were the prisoners who were later found dead. We DON’T know this.

At least one of the prisoners was still alive when moved to camp no, from the witness statement in the story. Given that Camp No was neither a morgue nor a hospital, I think we can assume that all of the prisoners transfered were at least in good enough shape to be interrogated.

From witness statement, the truck returned right to the infirmary and that’s when the party really started.

So whatever happened to them happened at Camp No. Which we assume to be an off the record interrogation camp.

If prisoners did it, then the victims must have been moved to Camp No and during their time there held such that other prisoners at Camp No had time to kill them.

Then you have to assume that rather then simply reporting what happened “The prisoners were killed by another prisoner because they were cooperating. These terrorists are animals”, they decide to cover up for the prisoner who did the killing?

I’m not seeing a downside to telling that story, IF that’s what happened.

Yeah, but what if my sources say he also had them use, “You Gotta Brand New Pair of Roller Skates” and chime in on the “I gotta brand new key” refrain? *g*

Adie!

I’m wondering how Horton got the info that McHenry participated in the torture memo drafting?

Teresa McHenry, the investigator charged with accounting for the deaths of the three men at Guantánamo, has firsthand knowledge of the Justice Department’s role in auditing such techniques, having served at the Justice Department under Bush and having participated in the preparation of at least one of those memos.

Does her name show up on any of them – I don’t recall that.

Still, this:

McHenry explained that “the gist of Sergeant Hickman’s information could not be confirmed.” But when Denbeaux asked what that “gist” actually was, McHenry declined to say. She just reiterated that Hickman’s conclusions “appeared” to be unsupported. Denbeaux asked what conclusions exactly were unsupported. McHenry refused to say.

sounds like the torture solicitors.

You do have to wonder if Robertson is going to want any lawyers back in to see him to flesh out why it was they didn’t use any under oath statements and if they had info that they withheld or deliberately misled the court with respect to the seized writings. I don’t know enough of the context to speculate, but since they’ve played fast and loose with his court before and since he resigned from FISCt over DOJ’s participation in a covert unconstitutional program that they tainted the court with, all without disclosure to any of the sitting judges other than the Chief Judge, he might start looking at the record of DOJ in his court and think about some additional prodding. I’m glad Horton highlighted that bit of the storyline.

2. And it’s a nice commentary on today’s military that Colonel Bumgardner is now in charge of training some of the next generation of Army officers, as well as being a visible representative on campus and in the local community, of the best the Army has to offer.

FWIW, chew on this: the next thirty years’ worth of Army officers (lieutenant colonels, colonels and generals) and the next fifty years’ worth of presidents and cabinet secretaries are now alive and aware of what is going on. They are growing up in a world where this is normal.

Remember, torture and mayhem are as addictive as any other activity to some people. Think Bundy or Dahmer. There are any number of that type down there in need of a “fix”.

Even more troubling is that the threshold of actually performing the act of torture and murder can be difficult to cross in our living environment here, IMO, limiting the actualization of some with the tendency. Dahmer, Bundy and any number of child molesters or rapists show that once that line is crossed, there is no reason to stop. Now that we have enabled some of our latent Dahmers, what profession are these animals going into when they return here? Is there any way to track these people once they return here? (I wouldn’t want to be the child or wife of one of these people when they get back!)

Yeah – he makes his ROTC staffers dress up as cheerleaders and prance around him singing, “Thunder thunder, thunderation, we’re the ROTC, delegation, when we fight with, determination, we create a, sensation” when he goes on campus.

I think that’s probably snark, but someone might want to check the requisitions for pom-pom orders, just to be sure.

This is the addition to item 124 of my Obama scandals list. The overall entry concerns the Bivens action mounted by the families of the 3 victims.

A January 18, 2010 article in Harpers by Scott Horton relates that four guards who were on duty the night of the deaths report that 3 prisoners were removed, one by one, and taken to a nearby facility nicknamed Camp No (because its existence was always denied). Shortly, before the deaths of the 3 detainees were “discovered” a paddy wagon returned from Camp No and pulled up to the infirmary, not the cell block. When the alarm sounded with the “discovery” of the deaths, guards with clear views of the buildings noted that they saw nothing moved from the cell block where the suicides were supposed to have occurred to the infirmary where the bodies magically appeared. The next morning, the camp commander called a meeting of the guards. He told them that while the 3 detainees had died by swallowing rags, the official report would say that the three had hanged themselves. They were instructed not to question this report in any way. This is the clearest evidence we have so far of both murder and a coverup. What is interesting, and disturbing, is that this information was conveyed to the Obama Justice Department which dealt with it in a dilatory fashion. When pressed about its progress, the DOJ announced it was closing its investigation. Murder, coverup, and now a further coverup spanning two Administrations. This suggests that the killings of al Zahrani, al Tabi, and Abdullah Ahmed are only the tip of the iceberg of such major league nastiness that even federal law enforcement (NCIS, FBI, DOJ) felt impelled to rush to obstruct justice to keep it from coming out.

As I read the piece, it sounds like the transports to Camp No happened the evening after they had just escorted O’Reilly through the camp and sent him off to do an “atta boys” piece for FOX – on how wonderfully cared for everyone was.

I always thought the music played with the squadron of helicopters attacking a village in the movie “apocalypse now” was “flight of the valkyries”. I had forgotten about the surfboards strapped to the helicopter’s skids, nice touch for a movie about a war that was completely out of bounds.

Well an undisclosed location can be anywhere and Gitmo certainly can be made very private. Camp No might have been Chaney’s own personal XXX peep show theater. There is very little you can accuse that man of that I would have a hard time believing.

Nitpicking: it should be a great sensation.
(I had to sit through way too many rallies in my first two years of HS – they were mandatory, because otherwise not many besides the team, the cheerleaders, and the band would have shown up.)

All I know is what I’ve picked up at Daily Dish’s highlight of the Harper’s article, and it is gruesome. Latest update is “Bumgarner Splutters“, but prior posts contain ghastly details.

Nothing at Daily Dish would have prompted Wm Ockham’s deduction about what may have occurred.

But if you google ‘Sheldon Whitehouse’ + ‘torture’, it’s pretty easy to locate what might be called early work last May, a time when Whitehouse commented that this would be a long slog, which would require time to explain to the American public that no actionable intel was obtained using torture methods.He predicted a long haul, with some process of some sort of National Accountability Commission set up by Congress. This article being published now is actually consistent with his predictions of last May, which I take as an encouraging sign that we won’t let this fester indefinitely.

Also last May, Liz Cheney was yapping hautily on every right-wing teevee show, to every compliant media host that would have her, that ‘torture kept us safe’. Predictably, she was trying to get out in front of public opinion and poison the well.

This is quite the ‘dropped shoe’.
I expect to see DiFi, Levin, and Whitehouse under particular venomous attack in coming weeks, as this news seeps out, since they control levers of Senate investigations. (Probably not this week; that would be too obvious, but the CheneyBots will attack in a week or two…)

Setting your [inappropriate] snark aside, I think you need to recognize the impact of the Army putting this guy in charge of the ROTC program at any college.

His presence there is the Army saying, to young and very impressionable kids: “This is the model of what an officer should be, and what you should aspire to make yourself into. WE would not have put him here if we didn’t think so.”

In other words, he comes with the Good Army-keeping Seal of Approval stamped right on his forehead.

So, this is the Army telling these kids: “covering up multiple murders if OK, especially if the victims are some scummy Ay-rabs.”

Thirty years on, I still remember the examples set by the officers in the ROTC detatchment where I trained.

Thirty years on, at least one of the guys I was in ROTC with is (or was) a general. Another was working for CIA (non-covert), last I checked. A couple more are (retired) colonels. Most of the others are senior executives in large corporations or own their own companies, or are professionals of one flavor or another – doctors, lawyers, scientists. They also received the same examples from the same ROTC officers as I did. Indeed, the whole “example” problem Bumgardner exemplifies is exacerbated in the ROTC context, because the average ROTC group has 3 to 10 officers. Those are the only officers these kids will see on a regular basis. IF these kids were going to West Point, they’d have a plethora of officers to serve as examples – the impact of a bad apple such as Bumgardner would be diluted in such a crowd.

The boys on Wall Street can’t predict what the price of stock will be tomorrow. How are we to predict who in a class of college ROTC kids will be where in what job, ten, twenty or thirty years from now? So, why are we allowing a craptacular example of what not to be or do, like Bumgardner, to influence impressionable officer cadets?

Some days, after reading these things, I’m numb and nauseous and I just can’t find anything to say. But it’s important to read it and to know. And to write a quick comment, to bear witness, or something, I really don’t know.

Those jobs have been used for that purpose in the past – officers who were decent place-fillers but not destined for anything great would often get slotted to head an ROTC unit. It’s considered the rough equivalent of a “command” slot, when the slots of real units to command are going to the guys going places. But radioactive guys like Bumgardner would get parked in an office in the Pentagon in charge of something like buying gasoline for the Army or something (where they could be watched, too), until they could get to a point of being allowed to retire gracefully.

Putting him in the ROTC slot is an indication of where the people who put him there (Bushbots, most likely) want the Army to go in future.

Horton has written a blockbuster piece. We have a prima facie case of cover-up, a likely case of murder, the disappearance of relevant evidence, the revelation of a new black site at Gitmo, new whistleblowers, an Obama administration which is now complicit in the cover-up, and even (as I’ve written about) yet another similar case, which Horton also mentions, occurring in June 2009.

Needle marks on one of the men’s arms points to the clear use of drugs in the torture of these men. The Pentagon Inspector General was conducting an investigation on the use of drugs in interrogation. I know because they contacted me when they thought I might have some info. I thought they really wanted help and were researching this. But now I believe they were simply sounding me out, wanting to know if I knew anything.

I wouldn’t trust this government with any investigation at this point. This is very, very bad. When the executive branch goes this bad, only Congress can effectively intervene. Horton indicates that Denbeaux went to some Congress members. I wonder what’s happening in that arena.

The word “rogue” got a lot of play during the election and after, much of it tongue-in-cheek. But I’m not being funny when I say we have a rogue government, or more clearly, executive in charge of this country. Changing administrations appears to amount more to changing deck chairs on the Titanic.

Wanting to know what you knew – or were willing to disclose – seems to be the theme in the FBI and DoJ’s interest in Hickman’s story. Not to investigate, but to determine who knew what that had to be spun.

Re Bad Boys… it’s the sexual perversion-thrill side to the sadistic control over peoples lives, and the torture.

WO’s surmises are, uncharacteristically, way, way off the mark. Anyone who has followed this story, for instance, read the Seton Hall earlier studies, knows what’s up.

I know how rotten NCIS can be from my investigation of the torture of Navy Petty Officer Daniel King by NCIS, and the outrageous conduct of its then Chief Psychologist Michael Gelles. Gelles was a primary figure in the construction of Obama’s new interrogation policy. I’ll be interviewed soon for a documentary along with one the military JAGs in the King case. The JAGs have documented other NCIS abominations in the conduct of “investigations”. You can read my FDL stories on the Gelles case for more info on that.

I think Hugh’s summary is very good.

From a psychologist’s standpoint, given that two of the three prisoners were slated to return home soon (though I believe from the SH report, one of them didn’t know it), and were not hard-cases with links to the Taliban or AQ, suicide is quite unlikely. Besides, the absurd scenario of their suicide is makes the whole event equally unlikely.

Only barely OT, with the revelation of a black site (long rumored) at Gitmo, it makes the earlier claims that al-Libi had been at Gitmo at one point more feasible.

I’ve also been approached by a major CIA figure involved in the torture controversies. I thought he was perhaps the victim of a guilty conscience, though he had nothing to report but the main government story. A friend helped me see that once again, they were mainly sounding me out to see what or how much I knew. This came after my articles on JPRA/SERE/Roger Aldrich.

I’m only now looking at the Seton Hall report. It’s hard to square Hickman’s report with the testimony of the prisoners in Alpha Block who report having seen the hanging bodies.

I should note that I like to think about a lot of different alternative solutions to these sort of puzzles. I don’t mind being completely wrong in public. When I’m wrong, people like you (and Marcy and bmaz, etc.) come along and set me straight. I think I find more and better solutions in the face of limited data this way.

Now that I have more information, here’s what seems to have happened. The prisoners were killed in Camp No, brought back to the clinic, and then the hangings were staged in Alpha Block.

On the other hand, the comings and goings from Camp No might have been completely unrelated to the deaths. Perhaps the three men were killed during Friday prayers by other prisoners and the none of the guards noticed.

Either one of those scenarios is possible, given the multiple cover-ups that occurred.

Hamdan was huge. Did they have foreknowledge of the decision, and conduct a preemptive strike (remember, they used the occasion to seize all prisoners papers, including correspondence with attorneys).

That may be a bit tinfoily. The other likelihood would have been an experiment went awry and three were killed in interrogation. But it seems unlikely that three would have died accidentally. The fact it was three deaths meant a message or program of some sort was being implemented. The government says it was asymmetrical warfare. They were right!!! But not on the side of the prisoners. It was the U.S. government through murder of prisoners that was conducting the asymmetrical warfare: with Hamdan looming, let the world know that the U.S. at camps like Gitmo were not suddenly go all soft. They can kill you at any time, and gruesomely.

Re the killings by prisoners: you need to explain how this happened without the knowledge of guards. I was personally told by the Gitmo Public Affairs Office that no prisoner was less than five minutes away from observation (Horton says it’s ten minutes). My attempts to get info on video monitoring of prisoners, in general, not specifically in this case, as well as the attempts of others, has been unsuccessful. When I asked about it, the Lt. Commander at the PAO hemmed and hawed a good deal, said he’d get back to me, and then said he was only comfortable by saying no one was more than five minutes away from being observed, i.e., they were checked very, very often.

Known video of corridors in the cellblocks was never asked for in the investigation of the 2006 “suicides”.

I think it is obvious, the details surrounding the supposed death scene hangings, that the latter were staged. The disappearance — in each case! – of the neck evidence is more than enough for me to argue for massive cover-up.

This is a case that cries out for screams of murder! Why screams? Because without it, we will not penetrate that curtain of imperturbability that is the Obama DOJ, or Congress for that matter. Horton, the attorney, has laid out the case, found the witnesses (along with the SH people). That was his job. Our job is somewhat different, and that is to agitate for an open investigation, and then, for justice.

Yes. Something very odd. Your scenario is possible. The mock hangings could have occurred at Camp No. I’m presuming the independent forensic examinations found some of the marks of a hanging that the AF pathologists reported.

Horton:

By dawn, the news had circulated through Camp America that three prisoners had committed suicide by swallowing rags. Colonel Bumgarner called a meeting of the guards, and at 7 a.m. at least fifty soldiers and sailors gathered at Camp America’s open-air theater….

According to independent interviews with soldiers who witnessed the speech, Bumgarner told his audience that “you all know” three prisoners in the Alpha Block at Camp 1 committed suicide during the night by swallowing rags, causing them to choke to death. This was a surprise to no one—even servicemen who had not worked the night before had heard about the rags. But then Bumgarner told those assembled that the media would report something different. It would report that the three prisoners had committed suicide by hanging themselves in their cells. It was important, he said, that servicemen make no comments or suggestions that in any way undermined the official report. He reminded the soldiers and sailors that their phone and email communications were being monitored. The meeting lasted no more than twenty minutes. (Bumgarner has not responded to requests for comment.)

The implication, at least as Sullivan is pursuing it at the Daily Dish, has been that this was the result of the torture program — torture that went too far.

But as bizarre as the original story was (three men commit identical suicides at the same time), three identical accidents where torture went too far is even harder to believe. Wouldn’t you have recognized the need to ease up by #3?

So it seems more like intentional homicide than an accidental result of a torture procedure, to me. If so, why? Why those three? Why killed? Who made the decision? To kill three people, it seems most likely that there was more than one killer in on it – not just in on the cover-up, but in on the crime. So a rogue interrogator killing one and then getting caught up in his own fun doesn’t seem like the answer. If it’s a group, it seems most likely to be explained by reasons of state. (I’m not saying good reasons, but reasons that other military people thought compelling enough that they’d convince others to keep quiet.)

This story doesn’t yet make sense. Nothing supports Ock’s theory that detainees killed other detainees. But there’s more going on than what Sullivan suggests.

The disappearance of the neck evidence, like the disappearance of JFK’s brain from the National Archives, takes out of circulation the evidence most required independently to verify autopsy findings.

When critical, irreplaceable evidence, evidence with the greatest obvious need for secure storage, is lost by the government in this manner, it is the result of planning and intention, not the result of accident or maladministration. That the cover-up leads to the top is now without question. What remains unanswered is how much is being covered up.

bmaz, I think you might have forgotten the moment when the terrorist shot the leg of the policeman’s wife in order to get the policeman (or was it fireman?) to call in sick.

My first thought, hey, that terrorist is stealing Jack’s moves.

If they want the terrorists to look like the bad guys this season, they shouldn’t be aping Jack. /s

To 24′s credit, (and I suppose to Fox’s credit for airing previous seasons) the show did have a black man and a white woman as president (and moral ones at that–although I didn’t watch the last season, so correct me if I’m wrong). 24 also did show that right wing military industrialist complex goons put profit motive ahead of morals and the safety of innocent Americans, (i.e, that it’s not always the brown people behind the bombing and killings).

Eh, good point; well at least the supposed good guys didn’t do the torture….

I was away somewhere without TV when the first four hours aired last year and never could get going; so I have the entire season on tivo. so i am starting this year with a gap, just like you; although that did not seem to matter so far. Your other points are well taken; it has always been more of a mixed bag than a lot of people give it credit for; not that some of the criticisms are not valid (some are). It is just really good entertainment to me; but I can see how many would not care for it. My wife, for instance, thinks it is very good, but won’t watch it because it is so violent it gives her nightmares.

Since you are here and the topic is torture…I have a question about the doc dump. The doc with the tape destruction timeline , CIA meeting with presidential advisors and discussion of presidential action has under date of document:

Unwillingness to prosecute led to an unwillingness to investigate, and this has led to a lack of preparedness.

As if Progressives weren’t saying this right after the inauguration.

A systematic erosion of government capability shot through every department during Bush’s eight years. It’s corruption – not cash in the freezer or free home improvements. It’s a grandiloquent show of arrogance – to turn the page and literally snub the injustice. This is complicity. And it is corrupt.

> (24 has) always been more of a mixed bag than a lot of people give it credit for;

I take it this is meant to point to the fact that it’s a bile-filled, torture-works, we’re-always catching-terrorists-with-no-time-to-spare-so-there’s-no-other-answer, they-hate-us-cause-of-our-freedom kind of show; BUT it isn’t particularly racist, so don’t give it a bad rap.

The word “rogue” got a lot of play during the election and after, much of it tongue-in-cheek. But I’m not being funny when I say we have a rogue government, or more clearly, executive in charge of this country. Changing administrations appears to amount more to changing deck chairs on the Titanic.

Jeff, this has been hard to shake from my mind after reading your words。

“The implication, at least as Sullivan is pursuing it at the Daily Dish, has been that this was the result of the torture program — torture that went too far.

But as bizarre as the original story was (three men commit identical suicides at the same time), three identical accidents where torture went too far is even harder to believe. Wouldn’t you have recognized the need to ease up by #3?

So it seems more like intentional homicide than an accidental result of a torture procedure, to me.”

These are not mutually exclusive.

Suppose ‘interrogations’ were in some way utilizing drugs administered to the detainees.

Suppose that for whatever reason some of the drugs administered were somehow ‘different’ than those normally administered.

Think about it.

That is how there might be a real problem in investigating what happened.

Note: previous statement based on no facts known other than what has been posted today on this subject.

Possible, but highly unlikely. I’d have to hear about the frequency of such occurrences. Maybe they missed one set of rounds, but they are to check again five to ten minutes later (and that’s assuming the cells aren’t under video observation). But the prisoners had been dead over two hours, and an attempt to revive one broke his jaw and teeth in rigor mortis. It also doesn’t jibe with the rest of the story, e.g., . The entire thing should be looked at in the totality of the given evidence.

Note: Scott Horton, I’ve heard, will be on Olberman tonight discussing the case!

I guess it also could have been a mini-earthquake. Your suggestion just sounds too deus ex machina. It could have been anything. If there are drugs involved, and you pose that maybe the drugs were different, I still don’t follow. Why were the drugs different? Why does is that a new “real problem in investigating what happened?” If scientific people are using new drugs, they’re unlikely to use the same dosages of new drugs on three different people all at the same time. They’ve had years for any such experiments.

You pose too many steps, none of which really answer any questions or solve any unlikelihoods. Intentionality seems a lot more likely to produce 3 deaths than the accidents of some sort of experiment in torture.

Maybe they went all Dr. Josef Mengele down there at Gitmo. Wanted to experiment with how far they could go before risking the techniques on a “high value” detainee. They might have decided to sacrifice more than one of the experimental subjects in order to determine the baseline.

I’m still trying to figure this out. Hickman’s story is that three prisoners (presumably the three soon-to-be dead men) were removed from Camp 1 between 6pm and 8pm on Friday, June 9, 2006. However, two other prisoners reported that they saw one of the three men at the 9:30pm prayers. Also, a fourth prisoner was interrogated that night, according to Horton’s post.

Of course, we have no way of validating the prisoner statements, but I’m assuming their statements are more trustworthy than the story presented by NCIS, CITF, and the DOJ (all of which have a reason to lie). The prisoners’ description of the discovery of the bodies is pretty consistent with real eyewitness testimony (lots of minor discrepancies, but nothing that indicates collusion).

So, this is the Army telling these kids: “covering up multiple murders if OK, especially if the victims are some scummy Ay-rabs.”

Actually, it sounds like he was far less involved in cover up than his superior officers and may even have been getting ready to leak info. I guess you might be fairly certain that your ex-ROTC buddies who went on to become generals, colonels and CIA are not or would not be similarly involved in covering up murder and abuse because you all had better role models in ROTC, but there certainly has not been a dearth of generals, colonels and CIA officers who have been very willing to engage in such cover ups and right now, even a Commander in Chief who seems on board.

And the official Army posture is that he didn’t cover up murders – there were no murders, just acts of assymetric warfare. He wasn’t reassigned because he helped cover up -he was reassigned because they were worried he was going to leak more.

I agree with:

His presence there is the Army saying, to young and very impressionable kids: “This is the model of what an officer should be, and what you should aspire to make yourself into. WE would not have put him here if we didn’t think so.”

and that’s why I don’t think the snark is inappropriate.

So, this is the Army telling these kids: “covering up multiple murders if OK, especially if the victims are some scummy Ay-rabs.”

I think if you really went with his posting being a reflection of what the miltiary is saying to kids, based on what’s in the article, there’s an argument to be made that they were saying, “hey, steal classified info with the motivation of leaking it and we’ll assign you to ROTC”

Or not.

@46 – yeah the were mandatory at my school too, but worse than that, I came from a family of jocks and was the youngest and we had no extended family in the city, so I was drug any number of baseball, hoops, football, track meets (oh lord, the trackmeets, ugh) wrestling matches etc.

Where does it say that the “official story” is that the guards did not do their rounds in Alpha block that night? The Seton Hall report from a few months back (PDF) says:

Negligence of the guards seems to have been ruled out by the absence of any disciplinary action by any military personnel. Although some of the guards were formally warned that their original statements were suspected to be false or that they were suspected of failing to follow direct orders, no guard was ultimately charged with either making a false statement or being derelict in his duty.

Could you be confusing the fact that Horton notes the NCIS didn’t mention that the guards were supposed to be checking on the prisoners every ten minutes (Seton Hall report states, “at least every ten minutes”)? But there’s no official story about missing rounds. In fact, Bumgarner called the guards “swift” and “professional”. Of course, the kicker is we don’t know who the guards were, and their identity wasn’t taken down by NCIS!

A dosage error was made.The concentration in the bottle was different, the same volume was administered;an overdose occurred.Unless the administration was far enough apart, all three could be the recipient of the overdose before symptoms occurred.

This type of dosage error can happen accidentally, it happens in hospitals every day. This can also be due to the actions of a perpetrator who causes it to happen based on the motive he/she has.

Another related variant to the above: the bottle has a different than normal drug in it. Previous possibilities apply to this.

“If scientific people are using new drugs, they’re unlikely to use the same dosages of new drugs on three different people all at the same time. They’ve had years for any such experiments.”

Mistakes do happen, OTOH it may not have been a mistake.

No comment on whether there may have been ‘scientists’ present here.

Well.. actually that would also present some ‘issues’.

No knowledge of this on my part, just presenting some things to think about.

Page 75 of the Seton Hall report quotes the conclusions of Adm. Harris:

Admiral Harris rejected the conclusion that the violation of the SOP regarding guard coverage contributed nothing to the detainees’ deaths. Instead, he concluded that the uninterrupted gap in guard coverage on the tier may have contributed to the detainees’ suicide preparation.

Not necessarily. The subjects could have been chosen based on biological or psychological criteria, in order to have a number of observations on different classes of subjects. If you are familiar with the history of MKULTRA, you’d know that a great deal of time was spent on assessment of interrogation subjects, to see how different types would respond to drugs, sensory deprivation, isolation, etc. The presence of multiple needle marks is suspicious.

I also have to have knowledge of current research — and am in the process of writing it up — wherein investigations of different vagal nerve tone, and measures of “Heart-rate variability” (HRV) are being used to differentiate subject response to intense, “uncontrollable” stress, and used SERE torture as a condition of study. It’s only one step more to needing actual torture prisoners, especially from the target population. And when you consider that the lead investigator was a CIA psychiatrist linked to Special Operations and the study of interrogations… well, then things start to look very different.

I’ve written on some of the latter before, but the link to the HRV military studies, whose sponsor was Ft. Detrick (long time associated with MKULTRA, human experimentation, etc.), is new. Comments like yours make me realize I’d better hurry up and get this info out in a usable format.

Putting him in the ROTC slot is an indication of where the people who put him there (Bushbots, most likely) want the Army to go in future

I think the changes in the “soldier’s creed” pretty much do highlight that already. Now it’s much more about being “the warrior” and being willing to rain “war” down anyone and for no reason or purpose other than war.

The old version:

I am an American Soldier.
I am a member of the United States Army — a protector of the greatest nation on earth.
Because I am proud of the uniform I wear, I will always act in ways creditable to the military service and the nation it is sworn to guard.
I am proud of my own organization. I will do all I can to make it the finest unit in the Army.
I will be loyal to those under whom I serve. I will do my full part to carry out orders and instructions given to me or my unit.
As a soldier, I realize that I am a member of a time-honored profession–that I am doing my share to keep alive the principles of freedom for which my country stands.
No matter what the situation I am in, I will never do anything, for pleasure, profit, or personal safety, which will disgrace my uniform, my unit, or my country.

********************
The “new and improved” Bush/Obama version doesn’t have nearly so much focus on not disgracing the uniform

********************
I am an American Soldier.
I am a Warrior and a member of a team.
I serve the people of the United States, and live the Army Values.
I will always place the mission first.
I will never accept defeat.
I will never quit.
I will never leave a fallen comrade.
I am disciplined, physically and mentally tough, trained and proficient in my warrior tasks and drills.
I always maintain my arms, my equipment and myself.
I am an expert and I am a professional.
I stand ready to deploy, engage, and destroy, the enemies of the United States of America in close combat.
I am a guardian of freedom and the American way of life.
I am an American Soldier.

@64 – I don’t think either of them knew they might be released. I believe that one was the subject of an actual order/determination, but his lawyers had not been allowed to communicate that to him (that provides another aspect to Horton’s story – in The Guantanamo Lawyers there is some detail on the odd circumstances when the detainee’s lawyers attempted to meet with him, very near his death. The other was on a list of detainees that were basically cleared for release, but for whome no orders had been issued.

I think the info in the Horton piece on the Saudi law enforcement position held by the father of the detainee who had been cleared for release is pretty important. In large part bc, as Marcy mentions, it is just haunting and makes you, as a person, flinch. But also because it speaks a bit to the fact that this kid was not going to just go back and be dumped in some poor, impoverished area with never a chance to tell any story.

Thank you for the quote, and I see Horton speaks of the “Official” story in his article. However, Harris also states his belief that following SOP wouldn’t have probably stopped the suicides. Also, no one was even disciplined, which is very odd. Harris is not believable. It was Harris who called the suicides “asymmetrical warfare” and ordered the camp-wide seizure of documents.

Also, not that in the quote you provide, even Harris states that violation of guard coverage “may” have contributed to the suicides. The official story appears to be that “permissive” attitudes and a breakdown of discipline “numerous ‘concessions’ that had been made with regard to the prisoners’ comfort, which ‘concessions’ had resulted in a “general confusion by the guard and the JDG staff over many of the rules that applied to the guard force’s handling of the detainees.” (Quote from Horton)

This story just doesn’t hold together, and Horton’s story is in fact a dissembling of that story.

What about the missing neck evidence, William? How does this fit your various scenarios?

I do not find compelling that prisoners would not lie or perhaps misremember who they saw when. They could have been tortured. We cannot cross-examine them to see.

By the way, another prisoner in the same SH study said this about the guards (p. 88):

End of three detainees hunger strike caused detainees to be even more vigilant in patrolling (“guards appeared to be watching them more closely, conducting even more roaming patrols of the block, that is, constantly walked up and down the block sometimes interrupting sleep by the frequency they walked by the cells”)

Doesn’t exactly fit with Admiral Harris’s story of the loosening of guard discipline. (Bold emphasis above was added.)

I think that doesn’t account for what the guards say about a lack of any detainees being taken from the block to the clinic. This isn’t just Hickman’s story – Horton has other sourcing

Hickman was concerned that such a serious incident could have occurred in Camp 1 on his watch. He asked his tower guards what they had seen. Penvose, from his position at Tower 1, had an unobstructed view of the walkway between Camp 1 and the medical clinic—the path by which any prisoners who died at Camp 1 would be delivered to the clinic. Penvose told Hickman, and later confirmed to me, that he saw no prisoners being moved from Camp 1 to the clinic. In Tower 4 (it should be noted that Army and Navy guard-tower designations differ), another Army specialist, David Caroll, was forty-five yards from Alpha Block, the cell block within Camp 1 that had housed the three dead men. He also had an unobstructed view of the alleyway that connected the cell block itself to the clinic. He likewise reported to Hickman, and confirmed to me, that he had seen no prisoners transferred to the clinic that night, dead or alive.

Sure, there are lots of possibilities and no way of knowing who is telling which truth or why. But when you look at the motivations, I’m so far not getting much on motivation for Hickman, Davila, Penvose and Caroll to lie.

I could understand possible motivations for General Al-Zahrani to lie – but it’s not as consistent with his push to have a more thorough autopsy done. I could understand motivations for other GITMO prisoners to lie – everything from personal grudges to promises of better to treatment to threats of worse – and I can also see how they might have been subjected to some ruses for disinformation. I can understand motivations for Shaker Aamer to lie. I can understand motivations for JSOC or CIA and military commanders and DOJ to lie. But I’m not getting the motivations for the guards.

Based on that, I’m trending towards a kill scenario that involved Camp No, but didn’t even necessarily involve taking the bodies back for staged hangings. Staging, perhaps, but not with bodies going back and forth.

And who loses the throat organs when the autopsy involves some kind of strangulation death? Again, I can understand motivations for losing all three much more consistent with an oops factors, despite my general tendency to believe strongly in oops factors.

And who loses the throat organs when the autopsy involves some kind of strangulation death? Again, I can understand motivations for losing all three much more consistent with an oops factors, despite my general tendency to believe strongly in oops factors.

Mary, are you saying that the loss of the neck evidence was purely a mistake, an “oops”.

The most likely explanation for that is to hide evidence of the way the prisoners actually died. The only way to unravel something like this is to make judgments about the likelihood that certain statements or pieces of evidence are true.

The key to this is the absurdity of the official story that three men committed suicide at the same time in the same impossible way (choking themselves by shoving a cloth down their own throats and then hanging themselves). I don’t know how anyone can start anywhere but with the assumption that the men were murdered and there is an official cover-up. The natural assumption is that the murderers were engaged in official U.S. business, but there are other possibilities.

If the official story is impossible, there must be some reason for the absurdity of it. Nobody would try to cover up a hanging by adding the detail about the cloth, so the hanging must be added detail. As a side note, we should be open to the possibility that the three men didn’t die exactly the same way. There’s an outside chance that one of them really did commit suicide and that was just opportunistically used as a cover for the other two deaths. That’s really unlikely, but who knows.

Let’s assume the three men did die the same way. It seems more likely than not that the manner of death was intended as a message. If it was a message, it was a message to other prisoners. If we did that, we are even sicker than I thought.

Actually, it’s McHenry who Horton says quashed things. McHenry (edited – not Horton, as I originally wrote) began under Bush. Was she reappointed? Or is she held over? Do Obama people have sufficient control yet?

I’m not making excuses. Just asking. I can imagine they do have sufficient control, and that this should have been a pretty high level thing to be dealt with. Hopefully Holder and his key deputies had knowledge of the allegations and the meeting.

I’d like to know what that code word meant. Apparently something very, very big which they had anticipated possibly happening and which they had prepared for. “Dead prisoner”? Lacks punch. “Murdered prisoner”? Now we’re getting there. Something else?

If the official story is impossible, there must be some reason for the absurdity of it. Nobody would try to cover up a hanging by adding the detail about the cloth, so the hanging must be added detail.

A side issue in Horton’s story is the fate of Bumgarner. He is disciplined and demoted, has his residence searched by the FBI after his supposed security breach. But what was the breach?

He lets it be known to the press (the Charlotte Observer reporter) that cloth was in the dead men’s mouths. This certainly goes against what the instructions were to camp personnel. Bumgarner told camp personnel that “everyone” knew about the rags stuffed down the throats, but the media would be told it was death by hanging. He even noted that emails and other communications by personnel would be monitored, i.e., you’d better not try and leak anything.

Then Bumgarner, in an unguarded moment lets it slip to the CO reporter that there was cloth in the prisoners’ mouths. This was a serious slip, and now the official story would have to become more intricate and absurd.

So yes, the hanging was added on after they died, possibly by rags shoved down their throats (to stifle screams? as part of waterboarding?). But as the story was put out by DoJ, it was the cloth that came out as the added detail to the cover story, a very unwanted detail, it seems.

As for speculations, like maybe one of the prisoners really did commit suicide, that’s just blind speculation, and so implausible that lacking some, even a small amount, of corroborating evidence, I discount it.

I want to be clear about a couple of points. I believe that Hickman, et.al. are telling the truth as they know it. I’m tending towards the idea that testimony of the prisoners who spoke to investigators is the truth as they know it. I question pretty much everything else. The “official” story is rather obviously bs. There’s probably some truth in the stories of the guards referred to as escorts. The stories of the guards in Alpha block were clearly tampered with by the commander (Bumgarner) on the night of deaths.

It would be hard to believe that Gov didn’t have some advance warning on what was going to happen with Hamdan. Remember how many of DOJ lawyers were not only clerks for Sup Ct justices themselves, with some ins, but also how many were going to be the “mentors” for paths to career success for the then current clerks.

***
I think the JSOC spec in Horton’s article in interesting too. If Camp No had been originally used by CIA, but then Rumsfeld opted in for having JSOC use it as well, there might have been some detainees who were interrogated at Camp NO who knew they had been abused by JSOC, not CIA. The DTA, which supposedly gave amnesty for prior military ordered torture, was passed in 2005. But what if things kept happening at Camp No, despite the *new* standards of the DTA? THings involving non-exempted CIA agents – involving JSOC who had already shot their wad under the DTA and didn’t have ongoing protections. Then you have Hamdan looming re: Geneva conventions and guys who were “interrogated” getting ready to be released and one of them from a Saudi family that might not be as easy to keep quiet as you might want.

That’s all just spec, but in keeping with WO’s approach of looking at lots of different what ifs – well, there’s one. What if Camp No was used by JSOC as well as CIA and the JSOC “amnesty” ended with the DTA passage, but “interrogations” continued. Then it looks bad on Hamdan as well, and some of the JSOC interrogees are now looking at release, one very soon. How do you mop up?

@78 – there’s a question I wish I knew the answer to also. Thanks.

Re: 24 – the big thing about it is that it’s fiction. Like the Die Hard movies and Transporter etc. where the “good guys” are always sending all kinds of cars into smashups that in the real world would be killing lots of innocent people. I watched it the first couple of seasons, now and then. I liked the intrigue parts, but I kind of lost interest after it was all about one -upping the prior episodes. I can still see it as entertainment, though. I guess it should come with a recorded caveat, like you get for things like The Dog Whisperer or pieces that use characters who seem “too close” to living persons. Or anti-depression drug ads.

This episode contains scenes of violence that should not be reproduced even with the assistance of a trained professional. Professional interrogators have advised that the techniques used in this episode do not work and should never be reproduced in the real world. Criminal convictions and wars without end where many innocent people die can and will result from the use of the techniques protrayed in this episode. Have a nice day.

I also watch things like the Terminator movies and Fifth Element without worrying a lot about the messages they send, but I guess the fact that kids being sent for training in interrogation or in the field conducting interrogations looked to 24 for inspiration makes it a more volatile topic. I think it says a lot more about the ability of Americans to separate fact from fiction than the series itself that it had that result, but I’m no expert on this one.

The only basis for the speculation that one of the prisoners died differently from the rest is that there is a whole lot more detail about al-Zarhani than the other two. More prisoners report remembering his body being discovered. There’s more description of resusciation attempts, etc.

I agree that it’s pretty weak tea and I don’t think that’s what happened, but when things are this confusing, I like to keep my mind open to various possibilities.

On February 23, 1946, under the doctrine of “command responsibility,” the United States executed Japanese general Tomoyuki Yamashita for failure to prevent war crimes by his troops in the Philippines during WW II.

Under the doctrine of “universal jurisdiction,” any government could indict, try in absentia, and issue an extradition request (international warrant) for those who tolerated these actions and/or participated in the cover-up.

I have a hard time with the suicide story: binding their own hands and then stuffing rags down their throats? It’s damned near impossible, even assuming binding the hands afterward.
(They’re contortionists with prehensile toes, perhaps?)

No – I’m saying that I tend to believe in “oops” as the explantion a lot of times when conspiracy stuff is spun out – but not this one. Not three patients, not such a high profile set of cases, not with requests from outside autopsiers. I tend to see a motivation behind that many losses in this situation.

I have no clue what’s going on but here’s something that occurred to me after my earlier comments: does anyone know how, why, or if this would line up with anything about BAE investigations? That’s all about black money, all dark ops, and as we’ve seen with Cheney, his modus operandi was about sabotaging legit military with his own ‘contractors’.

I can’t bear to read the full details, so will defer to others, but why would the son of a Saudi law enforcement person be among those murdered?

(I’m with JeffKaye here; how do 3 people not only choke themselves to death, but then have missing necks…) Sorry, my skin is too crawly to continue….

Then Bumgarner, in an unguarded moment lets it slip to the CO reporter that there was cloth in the prisoners’ mouths. This was a serious slip, and now the official story would have to become more intricate and absurd.

Aww, com’on. It’s not so hard to believe. After all, when they beat Sean Baker into disability during a “training exercise” at GITMO, the tape (which was requested within a few hours at most) mysteriously was missing, even though “all” training sessions were “required” to be taped.

Apparently there’s an OLC memo where “all” is defined to mean, “everything except anything that makes us look bad.”

But there’s no official story about missing rounds. In fact, Bumgarner called the guards “swift” and “professional”. Of course, the kicker is we don’t know who the guards were, and their identity wasn’t taken down by NCIS!

If you have a quote I missed re this “official” account, please identify it so I can read it and be better informed.

Okay, since I’m totally tin foil hatty today, in a style that I swear would make me look ready for the Ascot Races, how’s this for a hypothesis:
– someone knows the detainees are viewable by video connection
– those ‘someones’ screw with the tapes; putting a false feed, or a false scene, so that if ’rounds’ means that you look through the camera things ‘appear’ ON VIDEO to be ‘normal’, but meanwhile something else entirely is happening inside the cell…

Okay, tin foily enough…?

Puts me in mind of one of those “Ocean’s” movies with Clooney. The one where they had a false video feed to the security guards while they were robbing the casino. Anyone remember which of the “Ocean” movies that was…?

The point about Bumgarner is absolutely vital. The other issue is the speed at which the cover story was put together. The idea of hiding the ‘cloth in the throats’ detail from the media apparently originated the night of the deaths. Also, Harris and Bumgarner were together at Harris’s residence on the night that deaths took place. Weird.

Jeff mentioned heart rates and several people have argued for the “oops” story (plus cover-up) and I can add that these go together quite well.

For a long time, it was dogma that the sympathetic and parasympathetic controls on the heart were direct opposites. One ups heart rate and the other decreases it. But the real story is not so simple. For one thing, the two systems act on different aspects of heart rate. The sympathetic decreases the pre-ejection period, for example, while the parasympathetic has a more general slowing effect. This is why smoking is so bad for you: it simultaneously raises both sympathetic and parasympathetic inputs, making the heart try to speed up and slow down at the same time, and in ways that can lead to premature ejection (no giggling, please) which is, effectively, the same thing as a back-fire in the heart.

If you jacked up vagal tone (i.e., parasympathetic activity) and also stressed the person out (i.e., sympathetic activity), you could easily cause a back-fire that was fatal.

Even wilder: if you had no idea that sympathetic and parasympathetic activity were not opposite, you could do this without knowing what the consequences would be.

The comings and goings the night of their deaths certainly are suspicious.
So too are the findings of missing bones of the throat (a broken hyoid bone would indicate manual strangulation, and if one were trying to hide such an occurrence then disappearing the hyoid bone would be important, because you cannot very well tape it back together and ship the body home for others to discover).

Do we have the autopsy reports? any mention of algor mortis, rigor mortis, livor mortis, or time of last meal? (were the hunger striking prisoners force fed on a regular schedule? was the time of meal recorded? contents in stomach consistent with the timing of the meal?)

Any mention of rectal temperature at the time of discovery of the body? If they were discovered merely 2 hours after presumed death, then the time to reach ambient temperature should conform. (see “algor mortis,” or google Glaister equation). No refrigeration rooms or ice showers were given, right?

Someone above states that rigor mortis had already set in by the time the guard tried to resuscitate the prisoner. The rigor mortis is suspicious (as is trying to revive someone with rigor mortis). During a resuscitation attempt, a broken tooth could easily occur from using a laryngoscope to intubate the person, but a broken jaw? Never heard of it.

Also, if it has been less than 3 hours since death, then rigor mortis should not be apparent, or should be present in a very mild, early form. That assumes “normal” conditions. I suppose if the prisoners had been struggling to breathe and had been using up their ATP (body’s energy source) just before death, then rigor mortis could manifest sooner than 3 hours.

What about livor mortis? (also called postmortem lvidity). Livor mortis is a purplish discoloration of the skin, is gravity dependent and begins within 20 minutes of death. A hanging corpse will have livor mortis in the feet and hands. A corpse on the ground would have livor mortis on the back, and posterior aspects of the limbs. Livor mortis can help investigators determine if a death is staged if the livor mortis is inconsistent with apparent manner of death.

I think it says a lot more about the ability of Americans to separate fact from fiction than the series itself that it had that result, but I’m no expert on this one.

I think it mostly means that we don’t take Mirror Neurons seriously enough.
A tremendous amount of learning is non-verbal, and behavior based.

Did someone tell you how to groom a horse? Sure. But it was their activity, their actions, the tone of voice they used, their simpatico with horses that taught you.

Typical error among those of us who ‘read too much’: we think texts and verbal explanations are how everyone learns; most learning and communication are non-verbal. (Highly technical fields being the main exception.)
I hope JeffKaye will back me up on this point.

However, I think you’ve sussed a central motive:

If Camp No had been originally used by CIA, but then Rumsfeld opted in for having JSOC use it as well, there might have been some detainees who were interrogated at Camp NO who knew they had been abused by JSOC, not CIA. The DTA, which supposedly gave amnesty for prior military ordered torture, was passed in 2005. But what if things kept happening at Camp No, despite the *new* standards of the DTA? THings involving non-exempted CIA agents – involving JSOC who had already shot their wad under the DTA and didn’t have ongoing protections.

@133 Yep. Of all places, the key is the buttocks. If they died while hanging and were really still hanging in rigor when the guards got to them, they would not have livor in the buttocks. If they were manually strangled or choked to death while tied to a chair or strapped to a board, then they would. I’m almost positive that at least one US murder case turned on exactly this issue, but teh google isn’t helping me find it.

Joanneleon,
On days like this, it is good to listen to MLK Jr.’s “I have a dream” speech– all of it! People usually just focus on the ending, but that is even more powerful if you listen to the first half, too.

Yes, which implies this woman is in on ‘it’. Has she been identified and interviewed yet by Horton? My guess if Horton finds her she refuses to talk, without a lawyer present the very least. But probably refuses to talk.

Yes, my implied point exactly. The other point about livor mortis is that it onset is immediate, visually apparent by 2 hours, permanently set by 5 hours, maximum by 8 to 12 hours, and it does not disappear (unlike rigor mortis) until the body starts to decompose.

And autopsies are required by law when a person dies in custody, so I assume there are autopsies (whether accurate or ‘sloppy’) on these bodies held in captivity.
I’m looking for emptywheel’s prior posts on the deaths in captivity.

I don’t know if “most” learning is non-verbal, but there are definitely two different modalities. The role of, say, mirror neurons is still being worked out, but is important.

In any case, without going too deeply into it, I’d say I back the two of you up. But my mind is so engrossed with details from this Horton expose, and some other things I’m working with, I can’t really attend to this otherwise important issue.

Who! says they were in separate cells when they died?? does (crushing ones nuts while the family watched) ring a bell? (I might be out of line with this thought!) But I have dealt with a bunch of Loonies in my lifetime. Lift the carpet, and see what is in the dust on the floor under the carpet. It might make you sneeze,

Also, I’m looking for someone who can tell me if its SOP to have someone draw up a psychological post-mortem report on the suspected suicide? The NCIS Statement (PDF) on the investigation of the suicides doesn’t refer to any psych component.

It appears to me they didn’t bother with psych feedback on the case because they were going with the “martyrdom” story and that was it.

I don’t think texts and verbal explanations are how everyone learns at all ??

I do think that most guys can watch Live Free or Die Hard and not think that it would work out OKFINE if they drove a semi-trailer at high speeds, smashing into anyone they wanted to and they probably don’t really think a plane could whip around and end up nose to nose with their semi. I don’t think guys who watch the Transporter really think they could drive off an overpass and land in the empty space slot on a car carrier that happens to be going by under the overpass.

That doesn’t mean that I think people don’t learn by doing. I learn that was best myself about a lot of things, and a lot of things I think are hard to verbalize (like, with horses for example, and a loose one in the aisle that you want to go into his stall rather than running off into the pasture – and how you verbalize how much to back out of his space vs. come into to to keep his prey drive at a de minimis level and invite him into a space like his stall – as opposed to running up and trying to grab him. *g* And maybe getting a flying cowkick to the general vicinity of your head while he’s at it.

I still think what we had wasn’t so much learn by watching vis a vis 24 as a breakdown with the cognitive filter that lets people know that driving off an overpass isn’t going to end well, no matter what happens in the movie.

Oops. I didn’t mean to make any statement as to relatively amounts of explicit and implicit learning, just that a ton of the latter occurs in situations under which only the former is widely recognized.

Even wilder yet. In some people HRV is greater under stress, in others it is lower. They’ve differentiated successful Special Ops “warriors” as ones who have higher HRV at rest, and lower under stress, and the opposite for most of the rest of us. This kind of biological diversity is to be expected, and they want to use it to understand how to approach not just avoidance of PTSD, but also, I believe, to figure out who will and will not “crack” under physical (beatings, waterboarding) and psychological (isolation, sensory deprivation) pressures.

Think of it! If you are an interrogator, you have a hand-held device (which the CIA psychiatrist’s study partners developed), wireless, to detect HRV, and then correlate it to what kind of stressors an interrogation subject can withstand.

It’s scientific interrogation (which the Obama camp has said it wants to investigate), and with a vengeance!

…the Obama task force advised that the group develop a “scientific research program for interrogation” to develop new techniques and study existing ones to see whether they work.

I assume HVR stands for hypoxic ventilatory response.
That is interesting that in “warriors” their HVR is lower under stress. I wonder if near dead prisoners are sometimes mistaken for warriors during let’s say a waterboarding meetup. If they weren’t warriors they would be breathing faster. Floats they are a witch. Sinks they are not a witch…

1.You can’t trust our friends. [who their 'friends' are, only Satan knows...]
2. Keep the CIA out of it.
3. You can’t trust the uniformed military.
4. You have to run it out of OVP.

For the sake of argument, suppose the military was out of ‘it‘, whatever ‘it’ was.
Note that Porter Goss was newly replaced by Hayden, and within months Kappas returned to CIA**. I don’t grasp the significance, but someone else will.

Wm Ockham’s point nags: not to waste energy down rabbit warrens, but it’s entirely possible that Cheney/OVP had set up some kind of operation that required the military almost as a ‘screen’ for whatever the hell they were doing.

I don’t know enough about the individuals or circumstances, but why these 3?
The coverup is weird: the American public is supposed to dumbly shrug at missing body parts?!! (These liars continue to insult…)

The fact that the uniformed military didn’t seem to know what was going on lends credence to an ‘inside job’ of some kind. Understandable that the uniformed military guys would be scared — and screwed by whoever pulled this off and made them look like they weren’t doing their jobs.
Maybe this was one of Cheney’s outsourced ‘assignments’?

Pity, as the “martyrdom” story presumes a certain psychological state of mind, non? Here, that conclusion seems based more on propaganda and stereotypic profiling as it is on a rational analysis of individual patient make-ups at this point in their multi-year detention.

I still think what we had wasn’t so much learn by watching vis a vis 24 as a breakdown with the cognitive filter that lets people know that driving off an overpass isn’t going to end well, no matter what happens in the movie.

Awesome comment ;-))
I happen to agree wholeheartedly, and although I do love games, I think they’ve only made this filter weaker in many cases.

We need to be doing a LOT more research.
Instead, we’re letting AIG write derivative swaps like it’s 2004.

Which does prompt me to wonder whether any of these deceased men would have had any insider knowledge of banking schemes or black money operations…? Random question… no answer requested, nor sought.
But given all the weird money schemes, someone in that AQ network had to have known how to move dark money an awful lot of places…

They autopsied all three men, unless Navy corpsmen just happened to try out their handy dandy surgical saws on all three necks and just happened to cut out and discard the most essential physical evidence of how each of these men died.

I don’t think you can hang this all on McHenry, though (although that’s not what you were saying, I realize).

Horton says that when Hickman contacted Denbeaux et al, they all knew he needed legal representation before they went forward. So both Denbeaux’s agreed to represent him and they set up a meeting with Obama/Holder’s DOJ.

The father-and-son legal team were met by Rita Glavin, the acting head of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division; John Morton, who was soon to become an assistant secretary at the Department of Homeland Security; and Steven Fagell, counselor to the head of the Criminal Division. Fagell had been, along with the new attorney general, Eric Holder, a partner at the elite Washington law firm of Covington & Burling, and was widely viewed as “Holder’s eyes” in the Criminal Division.

So “Holder’s guy” in the crim div was in on that meeting. Fagell was also invovled (I thought this was very odd for the counselor to the Crim Div head) directly in questioning Davila. I’m going to say it again – I think that’s odd. Fagell’s the lawyer for the Crim Div basically – not a crim investigator or prosecutor. Why would he be doing direct questioning?

Fagell and two FBI agents interviewed Davila, who had left the Army, in Columbia, South Carolina. Fagell asked Davila if he was prepared to travel to Guantánamo to identify the locations of various sites. He said he was. “It seemed like they were interested,” Davila told me. “Then I never heard from them again.”

So from an EW approach, the “timeline” is that Hickman contacts Denbeaux in Jan 09 after the inaugeration. By Feb 2, Denbeaux has meetings lined up with DOJ and “Capitol Hill.” Glavin, Morton and Fagell (Holder’s guy) are at the meeting with DOJ and thank Denbeaux for coming to them without going to the media.

“Two days later” (Feb 4?), McHenry (who had assisted in the prep of at least one of the torture memos per HOrton) calls and says she’s heading the investigation. She goes to interview Hickman and at both the original DOJ meeting and the meeting between McHenry and Hickman, witness list info etc. is provided.

Nothing happens.

In April an FBI agent calls and says she doesn’t have the witness contact info (huh?!? – what, did McHenry lose it?) and asks if it could be provided again. It is.

Shortly thereafter, Fagell and two FBI agents interviewed Davila

That’s Holder’s guy directly involved in the interview/interrogation of Davila.

October 27, 2009 Denbeaux resumes talking to Congress and also has contacts with ABC News.

Two days later, Teresa McHenry called Mark Denbeaux and asked whether he had gone to Congress and ABC News about the matter.

So now it is known in Crim Div (where Holder’s guy is gen counsel and had been directly involved in part of the investigation) that contacts were made with Congress and the press. McHenry tells Denbeaux (Oct 29) that the investigation is over.

I don’t believe that, at this juncture and with this departmental info re: Congress, that McHenry gets to just make the call on her own that the investigation is done. There had to be some back and forth before that call. Back and forth that likely would have involved Fagell or he would have been briefed on.

When Denbeaux mentions people who haven’t been interviewed, she’s quick to say that there may be a few loose ends, but still is taking the position that the investigation is basically shut down.

Oct 30 (losing no time) Penvose is contacted
Nov 2 – McHenry contacts Denbeaux with the info that the investigation is definitely closed, the “gist” of the allegations cannot be confirmed – but she can’t answer what the “gist” was or which allegations cannot be confirmed. Or, to my mind, WHY they cannot be confirmed. Because of a lack of witnesses or because the “gist” is Camp No and it’s a classified matter that can’t be confirmed (or denied).

November 2009, Denbeaux releases the Seton Hall study based on the NCIS report that the Seton Hall kids deciphered (not on info that he also has obtained from his by now client Hickman)

Good detail to pursue. It may depend on how long they were left in a sitting position, if that’s the position they were in when death occurred.

Horton’s recitation of the facts implies that these may have been killed at Camp NO and moved repeatedly – from their positions at death, to being trussed to look like suicides, dumped in the van, and moved from the van to the clinic. That would have been relatively easy for fit military contractors, at least until rigor began to set in. (And frankly, I can’t remember whether they were found hanging in their cells and moved to the clinic or whether they were presumed to have been found hanging in their cells when the bodies were actually examined only after they had been moved to the clinic, but not photographed or examined in situ.)

Also makes me wonder why the unnamed [senior Navy noncommissioned officer] approached Penvose at 11:45pm and knew Penvose could find the woman in the mess hall. Were the Navy kept off the premises? Why didn’t the unnamed senior Navy NCO just go to the mess hall himself?

[The senior Navy] NCO —who, following standard operating procedures, wore no name tag—appeared to be extremely agitated. He instructed Penvose to go immediately to the Camp Delta chow hall, identify a female senior petty officer who would be dining there, and relay to her a specific code word. Penvose did as he was instructed. The officer leapt up from her seat and immediately ran out of the chow hall.

Presumably, rigor would set in more quickly in the tropics than in NYC. The Horton quote suggests it would be in incipient form within two hours. I understood that four hours would be more typical, at least in cooler climates. The face, jaw and extremities would be first affected. But a jaw already hard enough that it broke when attempting to open the mouth?

A first year medical student or experienced corpsman would not attempt to resuscitate a victim with rigor so advanced, nor without first examining pulse, pupils, etc. What then was the purpose of opening the mouth so wide that teeth and the jaw were broken? Wouldn’t it be more normal to take detailed observations, tissue samples and photographs, and wait for rigor to pass before attempting an autopsy? We seem to be lacking essential details.

Rags down the throat induces a similar sensation as waterboarding. Combined with beating the face, neck and chest, it would take seconds to induce uncontrollable panic, which seemed to be the prerequisite state that Cheney required before any interrogation.

The official story about these “suicides” and the resulting cover-up reminds me so much of what happened to prisoners in Southern jails during Jim Crow and what happened during Apartheid in South Africa. Our Attorney General and our President sure are leaving quite a legacy for themselves.

…but she can’t answer what the “gist” was or which allegations cannot be confirmed. Or, to my mind, WHY they cannot be confirmed. Because of a lack of witnesses or because the “gist” is Camp No and it’s a classified matter that can’t be confirmed (or denied).

Bingo. They are stymied by the classified nature of the black site, one which Obama is not going to reveal because, at least among other things, he is covering for other JSOC black sites (as at Bagram), and the official word is that he shut down the (CIA) black sites.

Also, no way Fagell is involved and not Holder, and if Holder, then Obama.

My God, this goes to the top in two successive administrations. These were no ordinary killings, no interrogators gone wild, this was, as speculated, a kind of message, and no one was supposed to know. We can thank the egoism of Bumgarner for the cloth gag slip (as also WO notes is important).

Also, I don’t think this is purely an OVP affair, and the military is ignorant. Harris, at least, was in on it from the beginning. From Horton:

Something about Bumgarner’s Observer interview seemed to have set off an alarm far up the chain of command. No sooner was Gordon’s story in print than Bumgarner was called to Admiral Harris’s office. As Bumgarner would tell Gordon in a follow-up profile three months later, Harris was holding up a copy of the Observer: “This,” said the admiral to Bumgarner, “could get me relieved.” (Harris did not respond to requests for comment.) That same day, an investigation was launched to determine whether classified information had been leaked from Guantánamo. Bumgarner was suspended

No, not panic before “any” interrogation, only those they thought panic would help. OR they were studying what or how much panic a person could stand. IT was more than panic, as there were beatings, at least, also drugs (the needle marks).

The guards supposedly found them hanging, but when the prisoners next cell over saw them, the bodies were already on the ground. I don’t think any prisoner is quoted as seeing a body hanging. See the notes in appendixes of the Seton Hall study.

Would the people doing the covering-up be aware of that, to the point of knowing what to hide or lose? (Hyoid bones aren’t that odd a piece of knowledge – I grew up reading mystery novels, and that was nearly as basic as fingerprints.)

The Martin Luther King You Don’t See on TV Media Beat (1/4/95) … From Vietnam to South Africa to Latin America, King said, the U.S. was “on the wrong side …http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=2269 – Cached – Similar

NOTE: I wish the efforts of Martin Luther King-immediately following the civil rights marches, when King began speaking out against the Vietnam War and the growing influence of the military industrial complex-were equally well publicized.

The speech (in the links above) certainly resonates with what is going on in the world today.

Incidentally, he was assassinated one year to the day after making this speech at Riverside Church.

Despite studying Guantánamo on a full-time basis for nearly four years, this is one of the most chilling accounts of the prison that I have ever read, and one which should not only lead to an independent inquiry, but also to calls to press ahead with the closure of Guantánamo — and the repatriation of as many prisoners as possible — without further delay.

Scott Horton doesn’t ask another pertinent question — whether it is feasible that the three men died as a result of “enhanced interrogations” that went too far, or whether they were deliberately murdered. The panic that greeted the arrival of the corpses at the clinic on that dreadful day suggests the former, but on reflection it seems unlikely that three accidental deaths could occur in such a short space of time.

Despite studying Guantánamo on a full-time basis for nearly four years, this is one of the most chilling accounts of the prison that I have ever read, and one which should not only lead to an independent inquiry, but also to calls to press ahead with the closure of Guantanamo — and the repatriation of as many prisoners as possible — without further delay.

Scott Horton doesn’t ask another pertinent question — whether it is feasible that the three men died as a result of “enhanced interrogations” that went too far, or whether they were deliberately murdered. The panic that greeted the arrival of the corpses at the clinic on that dreadful day suggests the former, but on reflection it seems unlikely that three accidental deaths could occur in such a short space of time.

Presumably, service doctors, but not pathologists, performed the autopsies, not interrogators. But if you suspect throttling or trauma to the breathing apparatus as the cause of death – or you know it because you were the throttler – then the tissue to take or lose is obvious.

A first year medical student or experienced corpsman would not attempt to resuscitate a victim with rigor so advanced

I agree. And rigor mortis starts with the heart, the most active muscle. If the jaw of the victim is already showing signs of rigor mortis at the time of resuscitation begins, then the heart muscle has already gone stiff and is not coming back to life.

The Seton Hall Death in Camp Delta report mentions resuscitation was tried on detainee “093″[Al Zahrani] for about 35 minutes, from 01:15 am to 01:50 am when the physician on scene declared him dead. The other two bodies were discovered after Al Zahrani, but unlike Al Zahrani, “Al Tabi and Ahmed were declared dead at the clinic at 01:15 and 01:16, respectively.” [page 5]

However page 3 of that report states “…each [were] reported to have been found hanging in his cell at approximately 00:20 on June 10 [2006].”

I haven’t read the report so I don’t know how that time gap is addressed. Or why Al Zahrani’s body took longer to be declared dead.

The inconsistency between resuscitation efforts and the apparent mild rigor suggests a factual conflict that needs resolution. If rigor, why no DOA based on it and other signs? It would seem that resuscitation was unwarranted, and therefore done for CYA, or the rigor was not apparent and first responders were going through the drill until an MD could pronounce.

It seems strange that it would take so long to get one, given how many prisoners were kept for so long, in such close confines and where hunger strikes or suicide efforts were routinely watched for.

I think the mystery of the “resuscitation effort” is that it was not one. They had gagged the guy with a rag stuck down his throat, but the official story was supposed to be “hanging”. So they needed to get the rag out of his throat. They didn’t count on the jaw having already set, and when they broke it, they decided they couldn’t break all three, so they had to leave the rags in, making the story that much less believable.

On the issue of drugs, do you all assume that the drugs would break down in a dead body? Why wouldn’t the independent autopsies performed for the families have found the drugs, particularly if it was administered in a dose significant enough to cause death? I’m not convinced that psychotropic drug experimentation was directly involved in the outcome.

I’ve read more of the report. Supposedly took 28 minutes to transport Al Zahrani’s body from his cell in Alpha Block to the medical clinic, which is 100 yards away. I guess this includes the time it takes to cut the body down from the noose, shackle him to a stretcher (maybe this is when the Alpha guards noticed his “noncompliance” ? /s).

All 5 Alpha Block guards accompanied Al Zahrani’s body to the clinic –leaving the Alpha Block unattended, and therefore “other guards from the camp who happened to be on or around Alpha Block discovered the second detainee. Al Tabi was found in his cell and brought to the clinic about 10 minutes after Al Zahrani. Minutes later, other guards discovered Ahmed hanging in his cell and brought him to the clinic.” [pages 4-5].

According to accounts, all three bodies showed signs of rigor mortis upon discovery, but each body received at least 30 minutes of CPR. Al Zahrani, the first body to be discovered and the first to arrive at the closed medical clinic was transfered to the Navy hospital when no doctor (nor doctor’s number) could be found at the clinic to ‘treat’ Al Zahrani. Therefore, I assume Al Zahrani received closer to 60 minutes of CPR/resuscitation attempts–else they let him lie there for 30 minutes before the Navy hospital began CPR ?! I wonder if Al Zahrani showed signs of life such as a shockable cardiac rhythm to warrant all this continued effort.

The report mentions someone after the events of the evening calling the medical center a “crime scene.”
I guess I could agree if one knowingly ran resuscitations on 3 dead bodies. If the prisoners died in their cells, however, or if they died off site and were staged as suicidal hangings, then those cells are potential crime scenes or secondary crime scenes now contaminated by their ‘rescuers.’

If the prisoners died off site at Camp No how does one get three bodies back into their cells undetected if the guards are not in on it? Since all of Alpha Block’s guards were at the medical center at the time of the discovery of the other two bodies, maybe this simplifies things a bit.

But the dog that did not bark: No one at the medical clinic asked for and no guards offered an explanation for what happened to these three men or how they were discovered. Very incurious people, they must be. Why be curious if the answers are already known?

The report does go into detail about how they were discovered and by which guard. But at the clinic, no guard was offering the information to the medical personnel, and no medical personnel was asking for details.

Then you have Horton’s article quoting the tower watchman Hickman, who was not interviewed for the NCIS report, nor was he part of Alpha Block. Neither he nor another tower watchman ever saw a body live or dead transfered from the prisoner cell blocks to the medical clinic–destroying the cover story (if Hickman is proved correct) that the guards and medical clinic personnel agreed to:

For more than an hour, the two lawyers described what Hickman had seen: the existence of Camp No, the transportation of the three prisoners, the van’s arrival at the medical clinic [from Camp No just before all hell broke loose], the lack of evidence that any bodies had ever been removed from Alpha Block, and so on.

Hickman’s perch in Tower 1 gave him a view of both the medical clinic and the Alpha Block.
He is an eyewitness to the comings and goings on that night, as well as the non-comings and non-goings that night (i.e., no movements from Alpha Block to medical center, contrary to the official story). He is speaking out, against superior’s orders to remain silent.

“But the dog that did not bark: No one at the medical clinic asked for and no guards offered an explanation for what happened to these three men or how they were discovered. Very incurious people, they must be. Why be curious if the answers are already known?”

Well based on: where they were working, the goings on that they knew of, the goings on that might have been speculated upon,and it was 2006 the veil was lifting on what had been going on worldwide wrt detainees.

Also they were aware that only enlisted personnel had been charged, convicted and jailed for what happened at Abu Ghraib.

They probably knew that unidentified people from unknown agencies and possibly contractors had been and were possibly still were present.

Multiple and probably unclear chains of command added to the uncertainty.

Asking questions? I can see why that might not have happened.

Let’s add the weapons in and get even more quiet thought in the absence of questions.

If you suspect foul play in this situation, would you suspect fellow inmates killed these detainees, or would you suspect someone else?

correction: Hickman’s watchtower men Penvose and Caroll reported to him that there had been no transfers from the Alpha Block to the medical clinic. The three detainees had been dropped off at the clinic by a van that had come from Camp No.

This information destroys the elaborate cover story that the men were found in their prison cells.
This information explains why every 5 to 10 minutes’ rounds on Alpha Block would have failed to discover anything amiss (because the 3 prisoners were at Camp No the whole time before their deaths)
This information explains why at 11:45 pm a code word spoken to a female NOC in the mess hall would cause her to go running out of the mess hall–an hour before, according to the official story, the bodies of the men are supposedly discovered “in their cells.”
Hickman’s account is devastating to the Official Story that Seton Hall outlined in Death in Camp Delta and Hickman’s account fills in some question marks that Seton Hall had about that official story.

Hickman’s account (with Penvose’s and Caroll’s corroboration), because it destroys the cover story that the prisoners died in their Alpha Block cells, places all the detailed statements by Alpha Block guards and their surviving prisoners in a new light. The guards and the remaining detainees go on at length about finding the bodies in the cells. What they saw or didn’t see.

All their statements are part of a coverup. An investigation begins right there. And who asked them to make the statements and under what threat stated or implied were they made? both the guards and their detainees?

Check out Seton Hall’s Appendix E (begins on page A-16):
“Discovery of the Detainees–Individual Guard Accounts”.
The guards are referred to as Alpha Guard #1, #2, #3, #4, and Alpha Block Sargent of the Guard (SOG), Alpha Block NCO, Alpha Block Platoon Leader. They go on about rapping on the bean hole, the detainee not responding to the noise, the need to look inside from an adjoining cell, pull the body down, finding a board to transfer him to the clinic, etc. All lies if Hickman’s statements are true.

Then the same with Appendix F (Information from Escort Statements in NCIS) although the accounts also discuss activities that occurred at the medical DET clinic

Appendix G (Details of the Detainee Statements during the NCIS and CITF investigation)
For NCIS: 1/5 detainees saw a detainee actually hanging in the cell, 1/5 didn’t see or hear anything, and 3/5 didn’t see anything.
For CITF (15 detainees interviewed): 4/15 (probably) saw all 3 detainees dead; 2/15 saw at least 1 detainee hanging in their cell (by that, I assume the dead detainee’s respective cell); 1/15 didn’t see or hear anything, and 4/15 didn’t see any of the detainees

and Appendix H (False Statement and Failure to Obey Direct Orders)
wonder if this was a way to keep the Alpha Guards from talking. Seems these false statement charges were dropped eventually.

Not me. Not with that typical logistically madcap signature on The Solution to All [Their] Problems.

Obviously, I’m in the “deliberate” camp. But somehow this:

The Justice Department—bolstered by sworn statements from Admiral Harris and from Carol Kisthardt, the special agent in charge of the NCIS investigation—claimed in a U.S. district court that the seizure was appropriate because there had been a conspiracy among the prisoners to commit suicide. Justice further claimed that investigators had found suicide notes and argued that the attorney-client materials were being used to pass communications among the prisoners.

didn’t sound so slick once events took it outside of Richard’s Cave, which might be why they haven’t tried to sell us a dozen or more such cases.

Imagine going through several waves of kamikazi jihadi nausea, Jack D. Ripper speeches to the troops from the like of Bumgarner (Aha! Then nightmare it is.) and all, while trying to force the “legitimized” disappearances of the rest of those prisoners.

These motivations are well past standard psychopathy, into some unnamable thing, but the actions that have been carried out are quite articulatable in our legal systems. Our delegatees’ inability to get any of the mounting atrocities called out and dealt with in the proper institutions has me truly worried, except when I’m feeling convinced.

Isn’t the elephant in the room Stanly McChrystal? Obviously, any speculation that this involved JSOC would place these events pretty solidly under his command, right? And along those lines, in February 2006, McChrystal’s job description changed from “Commanding General, Joint Special Operations Command” to “Commander, Joint Special Operations Command/Commander, Joint Special Operations Command Forward”. Any idea what JSOC Forward is? The most I can find about it is that McChrystal was at Ft. Bragg.

I can’t shake the idea that once the CIA started getting pressure they just moved the whole program to the DOD and hid it under JSOC (I’ve mentioned it before). There is some hint of this in the SASC report. It’s also clear the CIA was fully integrated in the JSOC interrogation program as early as 2004(likely earlier). I’d always imagined JSOC being confined to Iraq/Afghanistan under CENTCOM. The SASC report refers to facilities and events that have been confirmed elsewhere as JSOC as relating to “SMU-TF” which was taking orders from CENTCOM. Wasn’t Guantanamo under SOUTHCOM? If so (assuming JSOC @ Camp No) who the hell did/does JSOC answer to?

@219 and 200 – great comments and insight. The government did use the “fact” of the “suicides” to press for document seizure. And yes, McChrystal is in play. We just have to know who ran Camp No, and also who there killed the men. Even if JSOC, no way they did that without executive orders, or standing orders of some sort that allowed for such crimes. Camp No could be CIA, JSOC, or even, and this is not a speculation I’ve seen, and may be too far out there, DIA, or some division within it (DHS, etc.). Most likely whoever ran it, other intel agencies visited.

And like OrionATL, the case was on my mind soon as I awoke. Each of use should take a vow to make some kind of stir about it today. I’d like to call the NYT and WashPost and see why they’ve yet (though haven’t looked this AM) done more than carry an AP wire story on it.

Even if the primary motive for murdering these three was to prevent their testifying about how they had been tortured, what was the reason they were tortured in the first place? And why did the torture policy ever start?

There too, the example of Stalin’s NKVD is instructive. I suspect the detainees were tortured to extort out of them “confessions” that would support stories the U.S. government wanted supported (connections between Saddam, Al Qaeda, and WMD’s; official story of 9/11), and to prevent them from providing testimony — especially on these very matters — that the government did not want.

I am way late to this thread, but I finished Horton’s piece earlier when I was eating my lunch and like WO and nextstopchicago, the fact that 3 guys all end up dead at the same time is really bothering me, so I figured I would come over here to see what you all thought about this. I’ve scanned the thread, but perhaps not thoroughly enough, so maybe I missed it, but I’m wondering about what happened at Camp No when they got there…

We appear to have 4 guys (the 3 dead ones and the one who survived) all taken one-by-one to Camp No. That is wildly inefficient in and of itself, but whatever, the military isn’t known for efficiency.

Then what? Presumably all 4 guys get put in separate “interrogation” rooms. Then what? Do you have 1 team of interrogators that makes rounds like a doctor to each guy waiting in a room one at a time or do you have 4 teams of interrogators working the 4 guys over simulataneously? I have no idea, but it would be really useful to know the answer to this question. If it is the latter, then no way were the deaths accidental.

But, if it were the former, I can easily imagine a single team of “interrogators” torturing these guys one at a time, say until the guy is unconcious, at which point, they move on to the next room. I can also imagine that the group of thugs in question, might not be too careful with the rags, so they shove them too far down the throat and the unconscious victim suffocates after they leave the room.

They keep making their rounds and after leaving guy #4, they discovered guy #1 has been dead for awhile, guy #2 also dead, but maybe guy #3 is still warm. They pile all 3 guys in the van and hightail it back to the medical facility, where they only attempt to revive the warm guy because the rest have been gone too long.

Meanwhile, all hell breaks loose, because they weren’t supposed to kill anyone. If they were supposed to kill guys, they had a spectacularly crappy plan for how to tidy up afterwards.

Anyway, just wondering if anyone knows the answer to question number 1: 4 teams simultaneously or 1 team in sequence?

I’m midway through the Seton Hall report. Anyone have a medical or CPR background. I’m curious. In what percentage of attempts to resuscitate are “an oral-gastric tube” and/or a “urinary bladder catheter” considered appropriate? These are mentioned in the autopsy, according to Seton Hall.

I can see the intravenous catheter – possibly to administer drugs. But a urinary bladder catheter? A gastric tube?

If they’re not typically indicated (and keep in mind that none of the subjects showed any signs of life during the entire time the medics worked on them), then one wonders what exactly was being done in that time period. Could they have been essentially pumping the stomach to get something out – like a drug that had been administered?

Having finished the Seton Hall piece, I want to present some details that I think might be important, some of which have been mentioned before, and others maybe haven’t been highlighted, at least not here nor in other forums I’ve looked at.

1) In addition to the teeth broken in the course of trying to pry open a rigor-mortised jaw, there is the curious fact of the medical implements cited, including urinary catheter and gastric tube. Taken together, the broken teeth and the implements suggest an attempt to get into the body and get things out (the rag in the throat; substances in the stomach and in the urine) rather than efforts to resuscitate.

2) in addition to the missing throat, al Zahrani’s body was also delivered to his parents without the heart and the kidneys. The kidneys are the bodies toxin filters, so their absence is another important suggestion that there was an effort to cover up any drugs or chemicals that may have been administered. If you thought one or more might have been given drugs related to a stress experiment, as hypothesized by Jeff Kaye, the likely cause of death would be heart attack, so that would explain the missing heart. What else can explain these three missing body parts? To explain this as merely negligence seems impossible.

3) Several corpsmen testified that one or more of the bodies was “cold to the touch” or that the extremities were cold. At typical guantanamo June temperatures, I’m not clear that skin would feel “cold”. The average overnight low there is 76, and it wouldn’t typically reach the low till 6 am. At midnight, the temperature is more likely to be 80. Normal hand temperature is only 90, not 98. I could be wrong, but I think if you felt 80 degree skin, you wouldn’t notice temperature.

4) The report mentions training in standard medical code terms and the presence of a pattern of suicide attempts in the months leading up to June 9. So the incident described by Hickman in the cafeteria where someone told a senior officer a code word and she went running is hardly surprising nor does it lend itself to specially nefarious interpretations. Likely the code word mentioned by Hickman was something like “code blue”.

5) al Zahrani began expelling “thick and orange blood” from his mouth during the ambulance ride. per SJA, though NCIS only reports blood. From my brief research, orange blood seems to be pretty unusual. Perhaps someone with a medical background could opine on the possible causes.

6) The cloth in the mouth/throat was “nearly as big as a washcloth” and folded several times on itself. I draw no inference. I just found it an interesting detail. I had images of the cloth being something wadded.

7) “Colonel B” told combat camera personnel to stop filming the attempts to resuscitate. Is this Col. Bumgarner? Presumably there are a limited number of Colonels at a facility of that size. This is in addition to the incident the next morning when Hickman states that Bumgarner gave personnel the story that they were meant to tell. But the camera incident is in the official report, and thus confirmation that Bumgarner very quickly wanted to limit the amount and type of information that would be available. This adds credence to Hickman’s anecdote about the next morning.

8) Bumgarner told all involved to fill out “2823 sworn statements”, then told them not to, all at about 1:15 am.

9) Adm. Harris’s “asymmetrical” statement is even weirder than it seems. He attributes a “mystical belief” that three detainees must die for all detainees to be released. Where the hell did he come up with this? (This is apparently quoted in a Risen article in Nytimes on 6/11/06). This quote merits more investigation. If it’s not true (and it seems like a pretty bizarre belief to spread even among jihadis), then I look at it as an effort to exoticize the deaths, to make these prisoners seem bizarre and inscrutable. But it might have been inspired by something – some item of pop culture or some book Harris had read or something. Finding the source would be circumstantial evidence that he made it up. Anyone have any thoughts? Three must die that all are saved? Ring any bells?

10) There were more than 40 suicide attempts in months leading up to this. NONE of them were successful. Then suddenly three are successful. In addition to the extraordinary talent this would require, it seems psychologically extraordinary. Suicides fail for a variety of reasons but often it centers on a lack of real will to commit suicide. Even in the event of a coordinated pact, I’d expect someone to back down or fail. Note that suicide bombers are often rigged to be exploded remotely, because their handlers fear they won’t follow through.

Actually, another source gives the Guantanamo code word for multiple attempted suicides as “blizzard”. This is most likely related to my point 4 (rather than my own suggestion of “code blue”). It also suggests that something like “snow” would be the code for a single suicide attempt. I wonder if there was a code for multiple successful suicides. Certainly they seem to have had a plan of action for multiple attempts, which isn’t surprising. Just good planning. Whether they had a plan for multiple torture victims …

I’ve been able to find nothing related to the “three must die” idea. I can’t even find a very good citation. Risen’s article only puts “mystical” in quotes, the rest being paraphrase. And every other source I find models itself on his verbiage, making it seem like they probably refers back to his piece. Did he say this in an interview with Risen? On tv? What was the larger context of the quote? I think it would be useful to know. It’s a fairly Christian ideal – Christ died for our sins, etc. Martyrdom is common enough in pop Islam. But I don’t normally see it in this kind of abstraction — ie, martrys die in very particular ways, and their death is directly connected to the good it will do. They don’t commit suicide. And I don’t see claims that death will lead “mystically” or ineffably to some other, not intrinsically related good thing.

Harris is the son of an American serviceman and a Japanese woman, born in about 1947. Navy bio says he grew up in Tenn. and Fla. I have no idea whether he’s a Christian at all. I just find the imagery interesting and suggestive.

In a panic, people often let slip the truth is interesting ways. What occurs to me when you point out the myriad attempts at suicide, plus the description of the cloth in the throat, is that maybe one detainee swallowed a cloth during torture and died. Maybe he intended to do this; maybe he didn’t. Either way, my suggestion is that the torturers saw it as intentional and, therefore, started talking about asymmetric warfare (the slip) and, in a rage, the torturers killed the two others.

As to orange blood: that’s usually a sign of an iron deficiency. Had that detainee been hunger-striking? Was he vegetarian and the army wasn’t giving him iron by other means? Or, was the army shooting him up with drugs that reduce the ability of the body to uptake and/or retain iron?

5) al Zahrani began expelling “thick and orange blood” from his mouth during the ambulance ride. per SJA, though NCIS only reports blood. From my brief research, orange blood seems to be pretty unusual. Perhaps someone with a medical background could opine on the possible causes.

Since the “thick and orange blood” was coming from his mouth, I would suspect that stomach contents were mingled with the blood.

Great points and questions, nextstopchicago. No clue about the “orange blood.” Agree with bobschacht–maybe stomach contents/bile.

If you happen to know what pages the Seton Hall report discusses the autopsy findings I’d be interested in looking at them. I was scanning quickly through the document the other night looking for an actual report.
Did all three bodies have nasogastric tubes and urinary bladder catheters?
Any mention of an endotracheal tube for an airway?

The urinary catheter is standard in resuscitation. Normally used to capture all urine production, which measured per hour helps to determine how the kidneys are functioning once a person has stabilized and is recovering in bed in the ICU. The urinary catheter also keeps the bed clean and tidy, especially if the person is strapped down and cannot get out of bed.

The gastric tube would be helpful (if it is large bore) to suction out drugs, or more likely used to remove stomach secretions that normally accumulate and could potentially be vomited up while a patient is recovering in bed from a resuscitation. It is usually the last thing to be inserted (i.e., after the airway has been established) during a resuscitation.

Was there any mention of an oropharyngeal airway? These tubes should normally be left in place for a medical examiner or pathologist to mention at the time of autopsy.

If during the resuscitation the rags were blocking the airway and could not be removed quickly, then a cricothyrotomy would be necessary to reestablish airflow (and we know the interrogation sites had the kits).

Despite the “neck organs” being removed at autopsy and not returned with the bodies, do we know whether all three bodies had cricothyrotomies?

Of course performing all the resuscitation above presupposes the person is still somewhat alive/recently dead and not in rigor mortis.

Any thought that these tubes maybe were inserted (nasogastric, urinary, and tracheal? tubes) before and not after they “died in their cells”? If the detainees were being tortured at Camp No, a nasogastric tube and a urinary “foley” catheter in place during the interrogation (waterboarding?) might be helpful to keep vomitus and urine to a minimum.
The rags, difficult to remove after the detainee goes into laryngospasm or into death spiral, would necessitate an emergency airway via cricothyrotomy.

4) The report mentions training in standard medical code terms and the presence of a pattern of suicide attempts in the months leading up to June 9. So the incident described by Hickman in the cafeteria where someone told a senior officer a code word and she went running is hardly surprising nor does it lend itself to specially nefarious interpretations. Likely the code word mentioned by Hickman was something like “code blue”.

@237

Remember that code word was spoken at 11:45pm. It is nefarius (wrt the official story), because the first body to be “discovered” was not until after midnight.

I got the impression that the watchtower guard(to whom the codeword was given by the badgeless unnamed NOC along with the message to pass it on to the woman in the mess hall) did not know the codeword before, nor its meaning. If it represented merely ‘suicide attempt’, then I’d assume that word would be general knowledge among all the guards by 2006.